The Mummy director: This film is the biggest failure of my life. Universal's "Dark Monster Universe" was aborted.

Recently, when promoting his new drama "The Man Who Fell to Earth", Alex Kurtzman, director of "The Mummy", said that this movie in 2017 was the biggest failure of his personal and even professional life. This movie starring Tom Cruise made Universal Pictures lose $95 million, and the poor ratings directly aborted the "Dark Monster Universe" plan.

Alex Kurtzman said: "This may be the biggest failure in my life, both personally and professionally. People can't learn anything from success, but failure can teach you how to be a human being. I have almost a million regrets about this film. The 'cruel' production was a valuable learning experience for me."

Although The Mummy grossed $409 million worldwide with an investment of $125 million, Universal still lost $95 million after including the publicity and distribution costs. Crucially, the film's reputation was terrible, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 16% and an IMDb score of 5.4.

Alex Kurtzman

Before the film was released, Universal Pictures tried to emulate Marvel Studios to create a "dark monster universe", with The Mummy as the first film. At that time, Johnny Depp was also planned to star in The Bride of Frankenstein starring Javier Bardem of The Invisible Man (and Angelina Jolie was rumored to join).

The former "Dark Monster Universe" plan

Depp, Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Javier Bardem and others also took a group photo, but currently the only thing left in this universe is "The Mummy" and the group photo.

Many years later, "The Invisible Man" gave up on inviting Johnny Depp. Even after the promotional photos were taken, Universal still ruthlessly cut the budget of "The Invisible Man" and changed it to a small-to-medium production starring Elizabeth Moss and directed by Leigh Whannell. Fortunately, the word of mouth was quite good.

After "The Mummy" suffered a reputation disaster in 2017, Variety revealed that in addition to director Alex Kurtzman's inexperience, the lead actor Tom Cruise's excessive control also caused problems with the film's quality.

According to reports at the time, Tom Cruise was the boss of the crew during the production of The Mummy. This was because he had chosen director Alex Kurtzman, and since Kurtzman had never directed a commercial production before, Cruise was more like a real director on the set of The Mummy. An insider revealed to Variety that Cruise often controlled the filming of important action scenes and had the final say on production details.

After joining the film, Tom Cruise personally invited Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman, with whom he had worked in films such as "Jack Reacher" and "Mission: Impossible 5", to rewrite the script, making his character Nick Morton in the film more "Tom Cruise-like", which is far from the setting of Morton as a young man in the original script.

At the same time, the rewritten script greatly increased Cruise's role. In the original script, Morton and the Mummy Queen had 50-50 roles, but in the movie that was released, Morton became the unshakable core of the story. The new script also added a lot of highly dramatic plots such as evil spirits possessing Cruise. It is said that although the senior executives of Universal were not satisfied with this version of the script, they still agreed to shoot it according to Cruise's idea.

Universal Pictures later issued a statement denying that Tom Cruise had a negative impact on the production of "The Mummy".